Related papers: VERA-MH Concept Paper
In recent years, cognitive and mental health (CMH) disorders have increasingly become an important challenge for global public health, especially the suicide problem caused by multiple factors such as social competition, economic pressure…
Conversation agents, commonly referred to as chatbots, are increasingly deployed in many domains to allow people to have a natural interaction while trying to solve a specific problem. Given their widespread use, it is important to provide…
Online, people often recount their experiences turning to conversational AI agents (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot) for mental health support -- going so far as to replace their therapists. These anecdotes suggest that AI agents have great…
Large language models (LLMs) chatbots like ChatGPT are increasingly used for mental health support. They offer accessible, therapeutic support but also raise concerns about misinformation, over-reliance, and risks in high-stakes contexts of…
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly power mental-health chatbots, yet the field still lacks a scalable, theory-grounded way to decide which model is most effective to deploy. We present ESC-Judge, the first end-to-end evaluation…
Conversational chatbots are Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered applications that assist users with various tasks by responding in natural language and are prevalent across different industries. Most of the chatbots that we encounter on…
The 2022 World Mental Health Report calls for global mental health care reform, amid rising prevalence of issues like anxiety and depression that affect nearly one billion people worldwide. Traditional in-person therapy fails to meet this…
As a general purpose technology without a concrete pre-defined purpose, personal chatbots can be used for a whole range of objectives, depending on the personal needs, contexts, and tasks of an individual, and so potentially impact a…
Background: The increasing deployment of Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) in mental health interventions necessitates an evaluation of their efficacy in rectifying cognitive biases and recognizing affect in human-AI…
Online harms are a growing problem in digital spaces, putting user safety at risk and reducing trust in social media platforms. One of the most persistent forms of harm is hate speech. To address this, we need tools that combine the speed…
Mental health conversational agents have the potential to deliver valuable therapeutic impact, but low user engagement remains a critical barrier hindering their efficacy. Existing therapeutic approaches have leveraged clients' internal…
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into healthcare settings has gained significant attention, particularly for question-answering tasks. Given the high-stakes nature of healthcare, it is essential to ensure that LLM-generated…
AI chatbots are increasingly used for health advice, but their performance in psychiatric triage remains undercharacterized. Psychiatric triage is particularly challenging because urgency must often be inferred from thoughts, behavior, and…
As we build towards developing interactive systems that can recognize human emotional states and respond to individual needs more intuitively and empathetically in more personalized and context-aware computing time. This is especially…
Text-based online counselling scales across geographical and stigma barriers, yet faces practitioner shortages, lacks non-verbal cues and suffers inconsistent quality assurance. Whilst artificial intelligence offers promising solutions, its…
Introduction: To improve current public health strategies in suicide prevention and mental health, governments, researchers and private companies increasingly use information and communication technologies, and more specifically Artificial…
In collaboration with Postpartum Support International (PSI), a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting caregivers with postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, we developed three chatbots to provide context-specific empathetic…
As artificial intelligence (AI) regulations evolve and the regulatory landscape develops and becomes more complex, ensuring compliance with ethical guidelines and legal frameworks remains a challenge for AI developers. This paper introduces…
Providing timely support and intervention is crucial in mental health settings. As the need to engage youth comfortable with texting increases, mental health providers are exploring and adopting text-based media such as chatbots,…
Dialogue safety remains a pervasive challenge in open-domain human-machine interaction. Existing approaches propose distinctive dialogue safety taxonomies and datasets for detecting explicitly harmful responses. However, these taxonomies…